These incredible pictures of motorcycles under the Russian Empire (ended in 1917 with the Russian revolution) are not precisely dated or located. Like me, looking at them and you will wonder how many Harley Davidson and Indian motorcycles are still today languishing in Russian barns.

I read somewhere possession of pictures that portrayed a happy people in a non bolshevik Russia was enough to get you sent to Siberia during the Stalin times. If so these pictures are even more valuable than just for their portrayal of really neat motorcycles.

With some work one could possibly find a Harley or Indian in Russia but I would think that most would have been cannibalized to repair a tractor, rigging,or for some other piece of farm equipment. Metals of any kind would seem to be rare that anything available would have been recycled and MacGyvered so that there may not be much left of the original motorcycle.

With the likely hood that metals would be in short supply, I would think that any motorcycle that may have stopped running would have been MacGyvered for other uses and may not be more that a few pieces recognizable….

I was in Russia in 1994 on an agricultural exchange. As part of a team, I was learning about Russian farming practices. In actuality, my team and i were used as a labor force.

One day we spent hours weeding beet fields (by hand because we hadn’t had the proper state-sponsored technical training to use a garden hoe) as far as the eye could see. What was in the enormous shed at the edge of the field? 10’s of millions of dollars worth of nearly new John Deere farm equipment that had been donated by well meaning American philanthropic organizations. Why did it sit idle? Because when something broke, there was limited access to the relatively expensive repair parts and nobody with the expertise to fix it.

Interestingly, we were joined in the fields by hundreds of Russian soldiers keeping busy by weeding beet fields. They did get to use the hoes so Kudos to the Russkies for training their soldiers for life after the military.

What does this have to do with barns full of motorcycles? Probably nothing, but i thought I’d share anyways.